Stop asking people "Where is your humanity?"

This is what happens when we are continuously told that humans aren't worth the trouble.

For years, in the United States, the victims of mass shooting events tended to be treated as if they were killed in a natural disaster. Nothing could have been done to stop this from happening except shooting the perpetrator after they had already started. These events are explained by media as the actions of a sick and twisted individual, who simply woke up one day and decided to do something terrible. Events like the shooting in Uvalde, Texas are described as crimes so heinous, that only the most depraved of people would commit them. The public is supposed to gather around and collectively mourn the loss of innocent lives, and under no circumstances assign blame for what is agreed to be an unforeseeable event. Why are you talking about gun legislation at a time like this? How could you possibly think anyone would let this happen? Families are grieving, where is your humanity? The fact that as of the time I started writing this, the US had experienced its 83rd school shooting this year is another grim reminder that things have yet to change.

The media coverage of the murder of Brian Thompson — former CEO of UnitedHealthcare — is different. One doesn’t have to look far to see public sentiment in support of his alleged killer, Luigi Mangione. What’s more, the support appears to be bipartisan. While conservative media outlets have condemned Mangione as a radical-left terrorist, the r/conservative subreddit had people venting their own frustrations with the US healthcare system. These were people describing the painful process of either being denied healthcare by their own insurance company, or having to watch a loved one die as a result of being denied care. At a time when media outlets have declared political polarization to be at an all-time high, the celebration of Brian Thompson’s murder is an event that has seemingly crossed party lines.

As for Thompson’s alleged murderer, Mangione has now become a folk-hero of sorts, with would-be fans of Mangione even making fan edits of Thompson’s murder. Pundits of major news outlets have responded with shock and horror: “How can you possibly celebrate the death of someone?” they ask, horrified. “Where is our humanity?” New York Times writer Bret Stephens recently published an op-ed suggesting that for all the attention Mangione is getting, the real working class hero should be Thompson himself, who worked his way up from a middle class background to the position of CEO — something Stephens thinks everyone should aspire to. Why, he asks, are people less interested in celebrating a successful CEO, than the man who murdered him? What kind of society have we become that we are so willing to lionize Mangione, and dehumanize Brian Thompson?¹

Ingrid Jacques of USA Today wrote how for those who claim to be against the pain and suffering caused by the private healthcare industry, they (to her surprise) had no empathy for Thompson. Never mind the fact that he oversaw running a health insurance company that denied more claims than any other, or saw the implementation of an AI model with a known 90% error rate . Jacques refuses to connect these items of note to the public sentiment towards Thompson.

CNN’s Michael Smerconish has decried the “sad new normalcy” of the lack of empathy for Thompson. In a broadcast segment, Smerconish expressed his disgust at there being no public vigil or monument for Thompson, despite how there have been plenty for other murder victims like John Lennon, or the victims of the most recent school shooting. For Smerconish, it is outrageous that Thompson was treated worse in death than someone like George Floyd or Heather Heyer. Though it may be important to note that neither Floyd nor Heyer owned billion-dollar companies at the time of their deaths, nor were they ever under investigation for insider trading to the tune of $15 million.

What is so frustrating about reading these kinds of “calls for humanity” is that they’re coming from some of the exact same people who have refused to budge in their support for Israel, even as evidence for their ongoing genocide continues to mount. For both Jacques and Stephens, the targeted killings of aid workers, journalists, and health care professionals is simply the cost of doing business. US Senator John Fetterman openly celebrated Israel’s pager attack on Hezbollah which maimed thousands of non-combatants, but called Mangione a “sewer” that he’s happy to know will die in prison. This is all to say that no one is innocent of withholding their humanity from someone or some group, the question becomes who, why, and what is achieved in the process.

After October 7th, I remember briefly hearing the phrase: “You don’t need to be Jewish to support Israel, you just have to be human,” but it seems that the phrase never really caught on. I imagine it was because the idea of appealing to people’s humanity is a fairly difficult thing to do when you’re trying to get them to support an army that’s looting civilian homes and murdering children. To claim that only one side has a monopoly on “humanity” is to effectively dehumanize the other, both rhetorically and literally. The mistake is to think that dehumanization is matter of moral failure, when it is really a process and — above all — a tool. It is the conversion of a person into a means as opposed to an end, and it is a very necessary process in the way capitalism operates. Specifically, it is a necessary step in the continued accumulation of capital.

Dehumanization is what allows you to pay people less money for more labour. It’s the thing that allows you to ignore or repeal environmental protections at the expense of poisoning indigenous communities. If you see someone as a human, and not a worker - a complicated being instead of a rational economic actor - things get messy real fast. Dehumanization allows for efficiency: check your feelings at the door, and keep your work life and your personal life separate.

This becomes difficult because our work lives are our personal lives in many ways, and are increasingly becoming more so. As a result, we’re starting to reach the limits of what human labour can achieve and are starting to look for alternatives. It’s no wonder companies like Artisan are promising their clients they can “Stop Hiring Humans” and instead employ an entire suite of AI workers who don’t have all the baggage of you know, “people.”

I get it. People are a pain in to deal with. They have to leave work early because they have to pick their kids up from school. They get hangovers, colds, and take too many bathroom breaks. People have bodies. Bodies are these weird bags of meat and bone that don’t always work the way they’re supposed to. When that happens, people start looking for ways to fix them. This is known as healthcare.

More than almost any other industry, the healthcare industry sees people’s bodies and their failure to function as an opportunity to generate profit. Those who have known the experience of having to pay ridiculous prices as a result of their own physical suffering will tell you how nightmarish this feeling can be, something that those who express shock at the apathy towards Thompson’s death may have been lucky enough to avoid. If I had to watch someone I loved suffer in death because they were denied the healthcare they spent years paying into, at the very least, I wouldn’t begrudge anyone who laughed upon hearing about the murder of a healthcare CEO.

I’ve seen one comment suggest that any celebration of Mangione’s act of violence is celebrating all vigilante violence including ones that would target marginalized communities (gay, trans, POC). The irony of this statement is that this act of violence is being celebrated because it targeted a community that is by no measure marginalized (multi-millionaire healthcare insurance CEOs). In fact, there is something remarkable about how universally loathed a target Brian Thompson proved to be. There is simply no way that Mangione would be getting this kind of public support had he not targeted him.

Despite a history or radicalism, climate change activists like Just Stop Oil have drawn mostly public scorn for their actions. Abolitionist movements like Black Lives Matter have also been dismissed as a dangerous threat to public safety. Had the target been a politician — even one who was deeply connected to the health insurance industry — divisions amongst the public would have been immediate, and Mangione would have been declared a partisan radical. The fact that there’s been an outpouring of support for him and a massive condemnation of United Health means that something is very different about this act of political violence. It should probably be a sign that despite polling suggesting that 81% of US citizens are happy with their health insurance plans (this was cited in Stephens’ column), the ones who are in poorer health (i.e. the ones who require more care) tend to feel less so. Healthcare is a remarkably personal thing. To have been treated as less-then-human when you are at your most vulnerable is not an experience one can easily forget. It is our suffering, and our need for others to help us through it, that makes us the most human.

Reading Nicholas Florko’s response in The Atlantic may be one of the most infuriating reads of all. While he’s quick to point out how the American healthcare system causes “real and preventable harm,” he continuously reiterates how “murder is not the answer.” There is something nauseatingly patronizing about this. While I agree with him when he says cheering on a vigilante won’t fix the problem with healthcare in the US, to write an entire article that admits to the anger of the public being justified, yet dismayed that it would be acted upon is ridiculous. The fact that he describes his own colleagues uncovering how UnitedHealthcare had used an AI to kick seniors who still required care out of nursing homes as an unfortunate reality of the healthcare system, and not a deliberate act of cruelty is — I’m sorry — cowardly. Calls for decorum in a time where the most powerful could not care less about it does nothing but hold the person suffering to a higher standard of behaviour than the person making them suffer. Asking people to show humanity towards those who profit off a dehumanizing system doesn’t seem like the solution to fixing healthcare. If anything, it places the responsibility of perpetuating the broken system upon those who face the worst of it.

That said, I will concede one point. Florko closes his article remarking how the fact that Thompson’s death would be celebrated at all suggests that “something much greater is broken in American society.” Agreed, but whatever it is, it won’t matter to the new CEO of UnitedHealthcare, Andrew Whitty. If the public response to the death of his predecessor has taught him anything, it will likely be to hire personal security, an expense he should have no problem charging to the company.

1. I should note how the fact that Stephens cannot imagine a person’s anger towards someone who made $10 million a year by denying people healthcare is surprising. Stephens was once so angry at being called a “bedbug” on Twitter that it caused him to leave the platform. If that’s the worst thing that’s happened to him online, he should try and talk to a woman.